Life After Chernobyl

Michael Forster Rothbart:

My name is Michael Forster Rothbart. I’m a documentary photographer
and I just spent a year in Ukraine on a Fulbright grant and put together an exhibit called, After Chernobyl. just exploring how people are living in Chernobyl affected areas
today, a generation after the Chernobyl accident.

My commitment to this project began when I discovered how photojournalists typically photograph Chernobyl. They visit briefly and expect to find danger and despair so that's what they come away with.

And of course that's part of the Chernobyl experience. But that's only a small piece.
And I sought to create more nuanced portraits of these communities.
Of course there's suffering. But there's also joy and beauty and endurance and hope.
I decided to move out to a small farming village. Sukachi, which is about 10 miles from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. I wanted to do a somewhat representative sample of people living in different situations. urban and rural doing different kinds of work, all kinds of work.

Everyone from a nuclear physicist working at the Chernobyl plant to a subsistence farmer growing his own crops. After I developed more trust, then I started taking a lot more pictures
and pretty soon I became background to people's lives.

People were able to go about living their daily lives which is what I really wanted. I didn't want posed pictures .For a long time as a photographer I've been interested in what happens to people after some sort of environmental catastrophe.

Normally, the news media come in and cover very briefly and then they leave, but people's lives go on. and it's just very interesting for me to see how people cope with the changing environment. Their lives have been completely disrupted. And it talks and tells us a lot about humanity and people's resilience by understanding how people can manage in such difficult circumstances.

It's really rare for an artist to spend a full year working on a single project without other distractions. So, I'm really grateful to the Fulbright program for giving me this opportunity.

Really, I think the Fulbright grant is the best-kept secret for artists.

People tend to think of it as an academic grant but really it's for anyone.

And, what a rare opportunity it is to get to spend a year in some country that interests you and delve really deeply into a research topic or documentary topic or an artistic project that interests you.